Madrid halted coronavirus vaccination campaign due to lack of doses

The city of Madrid announced on Wednesday that it has suspended the administration of new doses of the coronavirus vaccine due to a lack of supply, while Catalonia has warned that it is depleting its reserves.

Despite having concluded early supply agreements, many countries in the European Union are experiencing huge delays in the quantities of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the only ones authorized to date for this entire sector on the continent. .

For this reason, the vice-president of the regional government of Madrid, Ignacio Aguado, indicated that they will suspend the new vaccinations to guarantee the administration of the second dose to those who await it.

“We do not know what will happen from next week, we hope that the usual arrival flow will be restored and increase the arrival of doses“, explained at a press conference.

Later, via Twitter, he indicated that the first doses would not be given “for at least the next two weeks” and asked the Spanish Ministry of Health to “move land, sea and air” to get more vaccines.

In addition, he warned that at the current rate, only 10% of the population of Madrid will be vaccinated at the end of July, far from the 70% target set by the Spanish government.

In Catalonia, the regional government’s director of public health, Josep Maria Argimon, has warned that when they administer the 30,000 doses scheduled for this week, “The strategic stock will have been consumed and the refrigerators will be empty.”

This will result in 10,000 people with the first dose already injected do not receive the second as expected, he assured.

According to the Ministry of Health, Spain administered 76.7% of the 1.77 million doses received as part of the European vaccination program.

Spain is in the middle of the third wave of the epidemic which, since its inception, It has caused more than 57,000 deaths and nearly 2.7 million confirmed cases in the country of 47.5 million people.

British pharmaceuticals AstraZeneca and American Pfizer have been targeted by the European Union since the start of the week due to delays in the delivery of doses and threatening to initiate legal proceedings.

The European Commission said Monday, after a meeting with the president of AstraZeneca, that its explanations for the delays announced in the deliveries of the vaccines “are not satisfactory”. so he called him to a new meeting that evening and threatened to “take action”.

Source: AFP

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